The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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A short reading list on the many lives of AOL, which will be acquired by Verizon for $4.4 billion. Fifteen years ago, AOL acquired Time Warner for $165 billion. Read more…

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
* * *

In Bloomberg Businessweek, Claire Suddath reports that there are only two countries in the world that don’t have some type of legally protected, partially paid leave for working women who just had a baby: Papua New Guinea and the U.S. The result is another big gap between the haves and have-nots:

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in business writing.
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Max Chafkin
Writer focusing on business and technology.
This piece explores the failed attempt by Mark Zuckerberg and Corey Booker, among others, to fix Newark’s schools—and in doing so makes clear just how hard education reform is. Most shockingly, it exposes the huge sums of money spent by the city and its supporters on education consultants who managed to extract huge fees without, apparently, doing a whole lot. It’s pretty hard to make a dense story about education reform read well, but Russakoff amazingly manages it, while managing to be fair and incisive. Read more…

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Since 2009, Longreads has thrived as a service and a community thanks to your direct financial support. Without Longreads Members’ contributions, it’s possible we would have had to shut down after just a couple years.
Now, here we are in 2014, with a global community of more than half a million readers. In April, Longreads joined the Automattic / WordPress.com family, which meant that the Longreads Member dues were no longer necessary to keep our four-person team going.
This also meant that we could finally make good on our original intention for the Longreads Membership—which was for 100% of your contributions to go directly to independent publishers and writers.
So that’s what we are announcing today: The Longreads Membership is now a great big digital story fund, financed with your generous support. The more Longreads Members who join, the more contributions we gather, the more stories we’ll help fund. Read more…

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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-A new Bloomberg Businessweek investigation, by Cam Simpson and Jesse Westbrook, on the hedge fund that helped fund Robert Mugabe, the notorious president of Zimbabwe.
Photo: sokwanele, Flickr

Taylor Swift has done it again, this time getting Apple to change its streaming deal with artists. Here’s a collection of stories on how the pop star runs the music industry.
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In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Swift says the future of music will be saved by this—the ability of a star to make millions of real friendships:
It’s not just the emotional bonds that will matter—it’s also the ability to thrive in a fragmented world where streaming overtakes individual album sales. Planet Money reported in 2012 that Swift and her team still know the best ways to move albums:
As the New Yorker’s Lizzie Widdicombe noted in 2011, there were early signs that Swift had a keen business sense:
After selling 1.29 million copies of her new album 1989, then pulling her music from the streaming service Spotify, Devin Leonard goes to Nashville to meet Scott Borchetta, founder of Swift’s label Big Machine Records, to understand the economics of being a label in 2014:
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